Tyro, Virginia is a tiny town in Nelson County, founded before the Civil War by the Massie family, which built a mill there and a mansion known as Pharsalia (far-SAIL-ee-uh). It might seem like an odd place for the international debut of art created to challenge terrorists, but the Virginia Center for Creative Arts made it happen as Sandy Hausman reports.
When terrorists attacked Paris last fall, artist Anne Ferrer was preparing to leave for a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst. She was just a few blocks away when a series of suicide bombs exploded and gunfire erupted. The experience was doubly frightening since her teenaged kids were out for the evening.
“I have two boys, and they were not there," she recalls. "They came back at 5 in the morning, so I was traumatized.”
Coming to the peaceful countryside around Sweet Briar College was just what Ferrer needed to mobilize her creativity in response to the attacks.
“I was still in shock, and I wanted to do a happy work – a work that would be playful, a little bit aggressive and moving, moving in every sense,” she says.
She designed four giant sculptures made from pink, red and yellow nylon – looking a bit like those blow-ups that grace commercial strips, waving in the wind to entice customers, but Ferrer’s structures are far more complex, asserting natural beauty in response to human destruction.
“Like a huge bouquet of flowers, but if you look carefully at those flowers, some of them are carnivorous. Some look like their petals are moving, but they become tentacles. Those beautiful things should be powerful, because we’re stronger than those guys,” she proclaims.
As her sculptures waved in the wind at Pharsalia – an old plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains – another fellow from the VCCA, John Nichols, shared the music he composed to accompany Ferrer’s work.
“It was made from a variety of field recordings, studio recordings and computer generated sound," Nichols says. "The sound moves with the sculptures to give the effect of breathing or blood flow, like the sculptures are living. This piece is a response to the attacks, but not a violent response. It’s a meditation.”
The show was up for one night only as part of a fundraiser at Pharsalia. Now it travels to France for the Stasbourg Art Fair and to the Allentown Museum of Art, directed by former Taubman head David Mickenberg.